The fallacy of eugenics is that 'smart' people have 'smart' children and the same for 'dumb' people.
I think 90% of this forum believes themselves to be smarter than their parents, so maybe pump the brakes.
I don't have the time to work through the math concretely, but intuitively, imagine that the intelligence of parents is normally distributed, and the intelligence of their children is a tighter normal distribution around the parents' intelligence. Set the cutoff for "participating on HN" to to some threshold. Given the right set of parameters, most of the "weight" in the aggregate child distribution above the threshold will come from the long tails of the child distributions of parents in the fat part of the parent distribution.
Again, this is the core fallacy of eugenics.
How many current US PhD's are the children/grandchildren of immigrants from underdeveloped countries who lacked education and worked manual jobs (or maybe even went through extended periods of unemployment)?
Why are you conflating immigrants from underdeveloped countries with low intelligence? The parents could be have been (likely were) highly intelligent, just lacking the opportunity or access to education.
The current US PhD's that are the children/grandchildren of immigrants aren't a random selection, they are the product of smart motivated parents working the system (immigration system, education system, admissions system) for and with their children.
The core fallacy of Eugenics is not that intelligence is heritable, it is that you can avoid terrible moral hazards when you try to meddle in this stuff.
I'm trying to say that regardless of who your parents are, your intelligence is primarily driven by your education (and your attitude towards education), with slight variance for genetic factors.
Therefore, we should not be anxious about "dumb people reproducing en masse" (as GP was).
We should be worried about educating everyone equally and fairly.
I don't think 50-80% heritability should be hand-waved away as "slight variance". I think what you're talking about is the manifestations of the intelligence (i.e. you can't be a rocket scientist if you never had the chance to learn about it), but not the intelligence itself.
Also please cite actual studies rather than Wikipedia. You’ll capture more nuance.
We conclude that there is now strong evidence that virtually all individual psychological differences, when reliably measured, are moderately to substantially heritable
For example, citation 6 implies nearly every personality trait is inherited, which seems aggressive to me.
Citation 7 is a book about how the genetic links get stronger with age, which seems also odd to take at face value.
Anyway, as great a source as Wikipedia can be, I wouldn't take its summaries at face value.
I hope not. I saw a pretty funny meme on Reddit today that went something like "50 years ago car manuals explained how to adjust the valves in your engine. Now they ask that you don't drink the battery fluid".
I think another big downside of so much technological progress is that people no longer need to understand, and get the benefit of learning, how things work. Yeah, it was a PITA that 35 years ago I had to muck with config.sys and autoexec.bat files, but it helped me have a better understanding of how things worked under the covers. There was some discussion on HN recently about how many Gen Z folks are woefully unprepared digitally for the workforce because they are so used to iPhones/iPads/apps, etc., that you don't know how thing actually work - like people not understanding what the file system is.
How do you smelt bronze? How do you grow crops? How do you build a lean-to?
Knowing how to do all those things does give you a very intrinsic understanding of a lot of things, but it's probably not wise to force everyone to learn those things.
EDIT: Apparently you don't smelt bronze, you smelt pure metals out of ores. lol.
What makes you say that's a fallacy? Everything I've read has shown intelligence to be highly hereditable. I'm not saying we should make policy changes based on that, but the science behind intelligence being (at least partially) hereditable seems pretty conclusive.
Then you read the paper and you see:
A total of 3511 CAGES (2115 females) participants had DNA extracted...Individuals were excluded from this study based on unresolved gender discrepancy, relatedness, call rate (≤ 0.95), and evidence of non-Caucasian descent...
Analyses of individual SNPs and genes did not result in any replicable genome-wide significant association. A gene-based test for association27 showed one genome-wide significant association (P = 9.2 × 10−7), with formin-binding protein 1-like (FNBP1L) on gf (Supplementary Figure 7). This single genome-wide association result for FNBP1L did not replicate in the independent NCNG sample (P = 0.211, gene-based test)...
Despite the fact that no specific genetic variants have been robustly associated with human intelligence, apart perhaps for APOE at older ages34,35, our results show for the first time that a substantial proportion (approximately 40 to 50%) of variation in human intelligence is associated with common SNPs (Minor allele frequency (MAF) > 0.01) that are in LD with causal variants...
Only 1% (approximately) of the variance was explained in the prediction analysis due to the individual SNP effects being very small and therefore estimated with much error, which detracts to a great extent from the accuracy (8-11%) of the prediction equation30. Our finding that 40-50% of phenotypic variation is explained by all SNPs is fully consistent with the low precision of a predictor based upon a discovery sample of ~3,500 individuals; estimation of the SNPs’ effects is different from prediction accuracy.
So basically, what they did, was take a bunch of British people born in the 1920's (a time/place famous for its rigid inter-generational class history), and found that members of certain family trees (that's more or less what it means to be British and have similar SNP distributions) scored similarly on tests, despite the fact that there's no real model to express why.
That and twin studies (which also have their obvious limits) are about the extent of current "evidence" for inherited intellect. I'm willing to be proven wrong, but 'conclusive' is hardly how I would characterize the state of true evidence-based research.
Seems to suggest that intelligence has a lot to do with genes. Why do you think that part supports your view that intelligence doesn't? Do you have any evidence that kids doesn't inherit any intelligence?
I'd be impressed if they saw the same thing across two populations where we know people aren't related, but I'd argue they just back-solved Britain's class structure.
One has to think critically in science.
>Do you have any evidence that kids doesn't inherit any intelligence
Well, if intelligence is inherited, then why are IQ tests going up over time (and therefore being recentered on 100 constantly)? Doesn't that imply learning is the driver?
We are artificially selecting the worst people to reproduce and dooming ourselves.